There's a nice advantage to giving assert() some code to execute, as a string, rather than a simple true/false value: commenting.

<?php

assert('is_int($int) /* $int parameter must be an int, not just numeric */');

// and my personal favoriteassert('false /* not yet implemented */');

?>

The comment will show up in the output (or in your assertion handler) and doesn't require someone debugging to go through your code trying to figure out why the assertion happened. That's no excuse to not comment your code, of course.

You need to use a block comment (/*...*/) because a line comment (//...) creates an "unexpected $end" parse error in the evaluated code. Bug? Could be.(You can get around it with "false // not yet implemented\n" but that screws up the message)

As noted on Wikipedia - "assertions are primarily a development tool, they are often disabled when a program is released to the public." and "Assertions should be used to document logically impossible situations and discover programming errors— if the 'impossible' occurs, then something fundamental is clearly wrong. This is distinct from error handling: most error conditions are possible, although some may be extremely unlikely to occur in practice. Using assertions as a general-purpose error handling mechanism is usually unwise: assertions do not allow for graceful recovery from errors, and an assertion failure will often halt the program's execution abruptly. Assertions also do not display a user-friendly error message."

This means that the advice given by "gk at proliberty dot com" to force assertions to be enabled, even when they have been disabled manually, goes against best practices of only using them as a development tool.

If you expect your code to be able to work well with other code, then you should not make any assumptions about the current state of assert_options() flags, prior to calling assert(): other code may disable ASSERT_ACTIVE, without you knowing it - this would render assert() useless!

To avoid this, ALWAYS set assert_options() IMMEDIATELY before calling assert(), per the C++ paradigm for assertion usage:

In one C++ source file, you can define and undefine NDEBUG multiple times, each time followed by #include <cassert>, to enable or disable the assert macro multiple times in the same source file.

Here is how I workaround this issue in my PHP code:

<?php
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/// phpxAssertHandler_f
//////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
/**
* @desc Handler which also sets up assert options if not being called as handler
Always fatal when assertion fails
Always make sure assertion is enabled
Cannot depend on other code not using assert or using its own assert handler!
USAGE:
// customize error level of assertion (php assert_options() only allows E_WARNING or nothing at all):
phpxAssertHandler_f(E_USER_NOTICE);
// control assertion active state: not dependent on anything another piece of code might do with ASSERT_ACTIVE
$GLOBALS['MY_ASSERT_ACTIVE']=false;
phpxAssertHandler_f(E_USER_NOTICE,$GLOBALS['MY_ASSERT_ACTIVE']);
// use alternate assertion callback function:
// NOTE: pass null as custom options parameter to use default options
// NOTE: pass no values for assert options parameter array elements to use default options
$GLOBALS['MY_ASSERT_ACTIVE']=false;
$GLOBALS['MY_ASSERT_CALLBACK']='myAssertCallback';
phpxAssertHandler_f(
null,
array(
0=>$GLOBALS['MY_ASSERT_ACTIVE'],
3=>$GLOBALS['MY_ASSERT_CALLBACK'],
)
);